The lively little sprite Ariel had nothing mischievous in his nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax.

Have you forgot the wicked witch Sycorax, who with age and envy was almost bent double?

This bad witch Sycorax, for her witchcrafts, too terrible to enter human hearing, was banished from Algiers, and here left by the sailors; and because you were a spirit too delicate to execute her wicked commands, she shut you up in a tree, where I found you howling.

Not an allusion to its shape or figure is made throughout the play; yet we assign it a form on its very first entrance, as soon as Prospero speaks of its refusing to comply with the" abhorred commands" of the witch, Sycorax.

"Cursed be I that did so!All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!"Shakspeare.

A`RIEL, in Shakespeare's "Tempest," a spirit of the air whom Prospero finds imprisoned by Sycorax in the cleft of a pine-tree, and liberates on condition of her serving him for a season, which she willingly engages to do, and does.

SYCORAX, a hag in the "Tempest," the dam of Caliban.